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At a Glance: Every once in a while you will be talking with a friend and suddenly remember a game that you rented a long time ago, when you were both young and could be entertained by exciting activities such as poking your baby brother or pissing yourself. One game that I remembered as being almost as exciting as those two things was City Connection. I couldn't remember anything about it except that I absolutely couldn't stand it enough to get past the first level. So I grabbed the ROM and loaded it up. At first I found the game hilarious, then found it kind of scary, then extremely depressing, and finally kind of crunchy and lumpy like really old milk. Basically it still sucked, possibly even more than it did in the days of my naive youth. I can't believe I ever wasted any of my time on crap like this when I could have been learning to spell things with my urine.

Ah, Paris, the city of love. Wait, that's not love, that's what remains of my Geo Metro after the taxi cab police car is through with me.Game Plot: The plot for this game takes place sometime in the future, hopefully the very distant future, in various cities across the face of the planet. In this horrid version of the future, the people of the world decided to make the roads as inefficient as possible, constructing them of floating chunks of wafer with large gaps between them so that cars must jump around like bugs on crack cocaine in order to navigate them.

Our hero is some kind of Speed Racer wannabe, but unfortunately instead of some badass-looking futuristic stock car, he only has a little red Geo Metro with a spoiler. Apparently this fruity bastard decides that he wants to go and paint all of the roads in the world white with his Metro because the little blue boxes they consist of now just aren't trendy anymore. The police don't seem very happy about this and they send the entire police force out to drive around like idiots in an attempt to stop you. When you get caught by the police your car explodes into six little hearts that float around the screen, at first making you laugh hysterically, then making you hide in your closet for days until you die of dehydration. Once you are done painting all of the roads in one city, your character lights up a fatty, closes his eyes, and is magically whisked away to another city where you have to start painting all over again. It's almost as much fun as it sounds. You'll probably want to light up a fatty and whisk your computer out the window after about three minutes of this game.

Weapons: As you drive around painting you will encounter many interesting items. They consist of cans and balloons. Did I say many? I meant "two." And did I said interesting? Oops, I meant "fucking stupid." You can throw the cans at the cop cars and they spin out of control, allowing you to smash into them and cause them to go flying off the screen. Remember this tactic well kids, it could get you out of a jam someday, or maybe, if you're lucky, get you shot. At first I thought the cans were beer and the secondary goal of this game was to get drunk without getting caught by the man. That initially made the game slightly more amusing. They turned out to be cans of oil, however, and my world was crushed. The balloons don't do anything except maybe give you points. Apparently the main character's hobbies consist of painting roads and collecting balloons, two things that are illegal in at least 42 states. Well, maybe not yet, but they should be.

My car tries to eat the cat causing the it to fly away with a frown. Only in New York City, folks! And London. And Paris. And anywhere else this godawful game takes you.Enemies: The main enemies of the game are the police. They drive their cars around trying to break your little Metro into the six chunks of love that all Metro's are spawned from, stopping your road painting shenanigans. There are also some spikes that come out of the ground on the lowest level of road that I only hit a couple of times.

The enemy that "killed" me the most, however, was a goddamned cat. I haven't mentioned the cat yet, but it is by far the most annoying enemy in any game I have ever played. It's some dumbass mutant cat that stands about five feet tall, "waving" a checkered flag around with a big smile on his face. Actually it doesn't wave, it doesn't have any animation at all, he just stands there like a statue. When you hit it you don't exactly die, it changes into it's alternate form of "dead and very sad frisbee cat that flies away at a forty-five degree angle and ends your game and makes you want to end your life" and floats away to cat heaven. This causes your Metro to do a little wheelie and stop instantly while the cat flies away very slowly and they play some happy polka music in the background. Instead of getting a bonus, you lose a life when you hit this feline fiend. I have been trying to purge all memories of this monstrosity from my mind but it just won't go away no matter how many liters of bleach I pour into my ear. This cat must be on the police emergency task force in charge of preventing idiots from painting the street or playing awful games. I know after I hit him about 162 times I stopped playing, so he is doing a bang up job.

Number of Levels: I only got to level three. I am sure there is something like nine or ten levels of this awful game, but I will never know. It is so insanely bad I can hardly stand getting to level three. The first three levels are New York City, London, and Paris. In London you will be privy to some of the most grating, awful music you have ever heard. There are notes that are hit in that level that make you spontaneously piss your pants and shit yourself while falling out of your chair crying like a little baby. The thing that makes this game so hard is the way it moves. Your Metro is constantly in the middle of the screen and only moves up and down, just like every other great car game out there. The background moves very slowly and the foreground moves very quickly in a very chunky manner that is guaranteed to make you vomit at least once.

What really hurts your head is the way other things move on the road. The cans slide along at a different speed than everything else, the cop cars float around, and the cat... dear god the cat... it seems to appear out of nowhere and smash into your car every time you jump from platform to platform. When you turn around, everything slides all over and moves at different speeds, showing that the programmers had the same grasp of physics as a dead sea monkey. A retarded dead sea monkey. That has had it's brain removed. If sea monkeys even have brains. The only thing that moves kind of normal is the balloon, but for some reason it moves with the background, so I didn't even know I was supposed to get it. The levels change by rearranging the placement of road chunks, rotating the scenery, and changing the cop cars. In London they have cop vans, not cop cars. And in France the taxis have apparently overthrown the local authorities and have taken things like busting up road painters into their own hands. Crazy French people!

Number of Bosses: There aren't any real bosses, but after you play for a couple of minutes you grow to hate the cat more than anything else. He is the epitome of evil in this game, with his mocking smile and prancing posture he just makes you want to hit him. Half the time I hit him it was on purpose, just to show him what an ass he was. There are too many of him to be a real boss, but if I had to call something in this game a boss, it would be the cat.

Defining Moment: When I got to the great level of Gay Puree, or whatever the hell you call Paris when you are trying to talk like a dirty Frenchman, I thought for sure I had mastered the games' awful controls and would be able to trounce through the rest of the game easily. I was putting away the coppers like some kind of madman with a Geo Metro that shoots oil cans, and the cat from hell was no match for my precision jumping and expert turning skills. Then the cops devised a surprise attack. Instead of all coming from the same direction they decided to come from both directions and sandwich me! This little tactic quickly drained my confidence and the remainder of my lives and I turned the game off and wept softly for a few hours. I was only able to play this game in a few half-hour spurts without losing my mind, but getting over the mental anguish it caused will take a lifetime. And every single time I see a cat for the rest of my life I will just have to kick it as hard as I can.

Graphics

-8

Gameplay

-9

Story

-10

Sound

-7

Fun

-6

Overall

-40

Each category in the rating system is based out of a possible -10 score (-10 being the worst). The overall score is based out of a possible -50 score (-50 being the worst).

About This Column

The Rom Pit is dedicated to reviewing the most bizarre and screwed up classic console games from the 1980's, the ones that made you wonder what kind of illegal substances the programmers were smoking when they worked on them. Strangely enough, the same illegal substances are often necessary to enjoy or make sense of most of these titles. No horrible Nintendo game is safe from the justice of the ROM Pit.